The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

Tyson Morgan

I'm going to use my blogging opportunity to plug the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson. Spring's coming, and what better way to usher in the season than with some melancholic Nordic fiction? You probably don't need publicity if James Wood just did a piece…

Claire Fuqua Anderson

I used to think audiobooks were for little old ladies who were losing their vision. (Little old ladies, bless you! You are the readers of America.) I could understand the arguments for long commutes and multitasking, and I'd even consider myself partial…

Will Donnelly

In 1982, children's book author Arnold Lobel published Ming Lo Moves the Mountain. In it, Ming Lo and his wife live next to a mountain that causes them nothing but trouble. Rocks fall from the mountainsides, their garden is always in shadow, clouds around…

Laura Jok

Over a bottle of wine, a writer friend of mine once caught me telling the truth. I drained my glass and forgot how to end sentences and started telling the story about a woman I knew who had dated Voldemort. "I remember that story," my friend said. I…

Will Wilkinson

A year or so ago, I listened to a Tin House podcast, a recording of Anthony Doerr, who usefully lays out a number of the themes of his talk in an this great handout):
I argue to my students that (in most cases) verbal repetition has a blunting, even soporific…

Joseph Scapellato

I. Submit Why? Submit to the idea that submitting your work to literary magazines is an essential part of the writing process: compose, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, revise, submit. Submit to the idea that submitting your work…

Layla Benitez-James

Lately I have been thinking about urgency and insistence in poetry; about those moments where the poet really reaches through the page and grabs the reader by the collar. Often these are moments when the writer seems to become obsessed with some idea…

Karyna McGlynn

AWP is a few weeks away and, despite my well-documented anxieties about the whole shebang, I'm particularly looking forward to the book fair this year. When I'm not hunkered down at the Gulf Coast table hawking our new "Sexy Lady" issue, I'll be scouring…

Elizabeth Lyons

Alone in my apartment, I still prefer to listen to music on my iPod. There's something about the immersive experience of music through headphones. There's something about the way I can sing along and not have to hear my voice as I do so. Perhaps it's…

Patrick Clement James

I used to love ghost stories, back when death didn't seem so real. When I was young, my dad often took my brother and I camping. At night we sat around the fire, roasting marshmallows, and he told us about monsters, aliens, and ghosts. We lived in New…